Your Blogging Staff

Contributing to this blog:
- "Dave" is Dave Barry, who is a humor columnist and presidential contender.
- "judi" is Judi Smith, who is Dave's Research Department, as well as being interested in men.
- "Walter" is Walter, a bone from the penis of a walrus.

Snottite? SNOTTITE? How much do these so-called scientists get paid anyway? They do all this fancy schmancy scientifical type stuff and use big words and things and they can't come up with a better word that SNOTTITE?

First, as a geologist, I would like to defend the word 'snottite.' I mean, they could have called it a 'petromucusoid,' or something. Second, you will be happy to know that unless they work for an oil or mineral exploration company, geologists don't get paid very much. For example, I am a paleontologist, so my yearly salary is, lets see, carry the four . . . nothing. I work for free, and will be fleeing the country when my student loans come due. To be fair, a really experienced geologist can earn anything up to 10 times this ammount. So you got word 'snottite' for pretty much nothing.

I loved the word snotitte and humorous scientists. I worked for a microbiologist that named a newly discovered species 'LKG 17' [or something like that], as a tabloid that had heard about his work published a PANIC story about a 'Lurking Killer Germ Invading Beaches!'

As I understand mineralogical naming conventions, snottite would necessarily have to be named for its discoverer, somebody with a name like Professor Snot. I learned this after I had suggested to a geologist that mineralized cave guano could be called "batshittite". He said that this would only be possible if it was first mentioned in the literature by someone named Batshitt.

OK, naming new minerals is actually a serious pain in the @ss. The process is controlled by the International Mineralogical Association Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification, which I'm sure is an dynamic and talented group of people, many of whom could easily be mistaken for minerals themselves. If you would like to check out the rules yourself, please look at http://www.geo.vu.nl/~ima-cnmmn/cnmmn98.pdf. Its 14 pages of action-packed fun, including sections on "Nomenclature of nanometric domains,"
"Nomenclature of polytypes, polytypoids and polymorphs," and of course, "Extended Levinson modifiers." The bottom line, however, is that a mineral cannot be named 'batshittite,' on the grounds that it is: A) amusing and, B) descriptive. Fortunately, 'snottite,' refers to a bacterial film on a cave formation, or 'speleothem,' and not a mineral. Speleologists are a very relaxed group of individuals, as the result of constantly whanging their heads on cave ceilings, and and therefore think nothing of giving amusing names to things. We need to give them a lot of credit for not naming it 'spoogite' or something.